How to Stop the Scroll by Writing Engaging Social Media Posts

“On Instagram, compelling imagery is what stops users in their feed. However, captions are what drives engagement” Stephanie Cartin. 

 

From 2020 going forward, Covid hasn’t been the only thing going viral. Behind your back, your competitors have mastered the art of creating engaging social media content, seasoning it with just the right amount of humor and releasing it to much frenzy from a content-craving base.



 

 



 

Eventually, when everything came back to normal, they kicked back and watched with excitement as their social media strategies came alive. They’re now reaping more engagement, more conversion, and a robust online presence.
 

Honest opinion, looking at the turbo-charged social media strategies running wild on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook nowadays, do you feel left behind? 
 

If so, you’re right–you’re missing out big time.
 

But not for long. 

 

 This is your no-frills, no-bs, extremely actionable, and mildly inspiring guide to entry into social media stardom and  building an unbeatable social marketing strategy. 


 

 1. Self Awareness is Everything

 

Self-awareness and brand are two words that you’d never expect to find together. In social media advertising, however, they’re Bonnie and Clyde. 

 

To build a winning social media strategy, write compelling social content,  and scale the ranks of social media stardom, being aware of your business and its place in the public consciousness is of essence.

 

This means knowing aspects of your brand that people love, those they hate, and those that people love to hate. Self-awareness will enable you to find:

 

  • Where the humor exists in your brand and industry
  • Misconceptions about your brand that you need to challenge
  • Beliefs that you need to amplify

 

2. A little Humor Goes a Long Way
 

Have you watched the news lately? 

 

It’s scary out there. 

 

The best gift that you can give your target audience right now is pieces of comedic relief that take their mind from all the sh**t that’s going wrong in the real world.



 

 



 

Nobody loves a grim brand. Consequently, you shouldn’t be one to deny your audience a few light-hearted moments as they raw dog a terrifying reality.  
 

Just ensure that you're dealing with a non-technical audience and everything falls within your brand voice and tone, and you’ll be more than fine.
 

You can use humor in your social platforms by:


 

  • Taking shots at your competition ( those guys suck btw)



 


 


 

  • Be Petty



 



 

  • Wordplay makes some of the best humor


 




 

  • Respond to light-hearted criticism


 



 

 

3. Simplicity is the ultimate Complexity

 

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” Albert Einstein.

 

The best social media posts are simple, brilliant, and intriguing. Once you read an insightful one, your eyes light up, your expression changes and you quickly forward it to your mom. At least I do.



 

 



 

They explain relatable emotions, feelings, and aspects of human experience in a way many people have felt, but just couldn’t find a way to put it into words.
 

 That’s what makes viral videos and photos beloved in the first place.

 

4. Punctuate with Emojis 
 

I love emojis. In fact, I season my replies with a healthy dose of those things, especially when I don’t know what the other guy is saying, or what to say.  

 

For example, if you text me in a language I’ve never heard before, this would be my reply:

 

“????, yeah right” 
 

In your social channels, however, emojis are best used conservatively, in moderation, and in the context of your tonal guidelines. 

 

And if yellow facial expressions are not your cup of tea—-or you can’t find where to place them in your strategy, don’t worry, there are other alternatives for descriptive imagery in your text. Content Marketing Institute is an excellent example:



 



 

Other options for special characters include:

 

  • Symbols i.e a ???? direct the reader to a link etc 
  • Checkboxes for a sense of action or verification ✅ or ❎
  • The check mark emoji ✔️ is great for positive feedback
  • A gift for a giveaway ????
  • Use the siren to get the attention of your audience ????

 

5. Visual Content is the Backbone of Any Strategy


 




 

Don’t forget to punctuate your social posts with a healthy dose of visual stimulation and engaging graphics. 

Why? 
 

Today, most people would scroll so fast past a pictureless block of words they might hurt their fingers. 
 

Graphics are the backbone of any social media strategy. If you’ve ever been stopped in your tracks scrolling on a social network, 9 out of 10 times, there’s a spectacular image involved.

 

  • Use real photos instead of stock photos
  • Post the latest trends using Pinterest’s most repinned page
  • Use bold and vibrant colors to catch the eye of your target audience

 

6. How About Some User Generated Content?
 

People (you and your customers included) no longer trust salespeople. They’ve become accustomed to the sneaky little tips and tricks we use and developed a resistance to our charm. 

 

 The solution? 

 

Well, don’t use salespeople and brand-generated content all the time. Why would you? Especially when you have thousands of customers each with something good to say about your brand. 
 

It’s called user-generated content, and it's a gamechanger.

 

This is using your customer testimonials, reviews and real world stories and experiences for your social media content. Yeah, let your customers,and their social media accounts, do the talking.

 

You can leverage user generated content by:


 

  • Post social media reviews (even from other social channels)



 



 

  • Quoting your current customers tweets on Twitter



 

 


 

  • Post your customers tweets on Instagram


 


 



 

  • Post pictures of people using your product



 


 



 

7. Show Empathy…Sorry…Real Empathy

 

Social media is an excellent channel to expose the human side of your operation—something your audience may never get to see or even know of its existence. 

 

Showing genuine empathy is simple—or rather should be simple. In a few words, you can show your audience that they’re not alone, that you know how they feel, and warm them with contentment from within.

 

However, it has to be genuine, selfless, and real; over the years your audiences have developed a keen eye for ingenious brands hiding other interests behind empathetic quotes, and they’ll cook you for it. Here is an example of an empathetic post gone wrong:



 



 

You can achieve the opposite of  the above post in the followwing steps:


 

  • Post on a national holiday, remembrance or memorial



 


 



 

  • Celebrate Groups of People



 


 


 

  • Give back to society



 


 



 

8. Benefits Over Features

 

Left to their own devices, most people would fill their social media captions with the innovative features of their products. A terrible miscalculation. 

 

In a world that’s slowly shifting from blind consumerism, flashy features are no longer enough to convince a social media user to buy your product or engage with your brand. 
 

And it’s even worse if you use a terribly crafted and salesly social media post for your bidding. It looks bad.

 

The solution? 

 

Focus on the benefits of your features instead. For example, don’t say that the smartphone you have on sale is 6.18mm (the feature)---nobody knows what to do with this information. 

 

How about saying it can literally fit anywhere or doesn’t leave an annoying bulge(the benefit)?  

 

9. Make Your Social Posts About Everything...Not Neccessarily You

 

A misconception many brands hold is that any social media post they may have should somehow be tied to or lead back to their brand or products. Nothing can be further from the truth. 

 

You can make social media content about anything, ranging from seasonal festivities, passing trends, funny stories, and national holidays. If you ever run out of options or something to put on your Facebook page, you’re doing something wrong.  

 

Others will even argue that audiences at brands that make every social message an endorsement of themselves are limiting their online growth.You can:
 

  • Create general educational content



 


 


 

  • Give advice or motivation



 


 



 

  • You can always get away with cute animals



 


 



 

  • Even better than cute animals…post people



 


 


 

10. Write Sharable Content
 

Every once in a while, you’ll run across content that leaves you gleaming from the inside and elevates your mood.  
 

Before you know it, you’re tagging a best friend for those “You got to see this” bragging rights, then your mom and your colleagues. 
 

That’s the power of sharable content, and once your brand knows how to craft content audiences want to share, your competitors wouldn’t know how to contain you.

 

Shareable content is content that:

 

  • Provides value (often a listicle)



 


 


 

  • Is relatable



 




 

  • Helps people define and express themselves



 


 


 

  • Make them feel connected to a group of people



 


 


 

11. Add a Call to Action 
 

So you’ve written a compelling caption and followed up with an equally intriguing graphic, and to your delight, audiences can’t get enough of it. 
 

What next? 

 

To most brands, it’s adios muchachos, goodbye, see you in two years when we post another banger tweet or Instagram post. 

 

But you're not most brands, that’s why you’ll accompany most of your social media posts with a call to action.

 

A call to action directs your audience, shows them the way forward, and closes the circle of social media marketing with real engagement. Maybe:
 

  • It redirects them to another type of content such as a more detailed blog post
  • Tells them to checkout a new feature
  • Requests them to tag someone they know or share the post

 

Otherwise, you’re better off shoveling snow in a never-ending blizzard.

 

Here’s an example from yours truly, Wendy’s:



 



 

12. Leverage Puzzles, Quizzes and Riddles, and Polls
 

Posts become monotonous fast. 

 

Hurray….it’s just another brand with a patched together caption and an overused meme…how exciting and unique. Let’s give them all our money quick. 

 

Fortunately, there are better ways to create audience engagement that aren’t the cliche everyday post. These include puzzles, quizzes, riddles, and polls. Here’s how:

 

  • Create competitions and brand national days



 



 

  • Create a Twitter poll



 



 

  • Leverage creative questioning



 

 



 

13. Keep up With Current Events

 

Did you know that the NBA final was last week? Just joking. 

 

Or when Drake will drop his next album, or when the next Star Wars sequel will come out. Here’s Drake’s album cover photo btw:



 

drake album cover photo


 

You are probably wondering what these things have to do with creating compelling content. Well, you guessed it, everything.

 

Keeping up with ongoing trends is a solid strategy for building your online presence. Most of your target audience, like other ordinary people, are fans of Drake, Obi-Wan Kenobi diehards, and NBA junkies;  and you’ll never go wrong with creating parallels between your brand and pop culture.

 

A day after Drake released his Certified Lover Boy album, this is what Adobe’s Social Media team came up with. And going by the shares, this was a certified success, their best one yet.



 



 

And what happened when the lights went off at SuperBowl 2013? To everybody else, it was just a slight mishap they’d fix in a minute and everything would be back to normal. But to Oreo’s social media team, that darkness was the opportunity of a lifetime:



 



 

14. Show the Numbers Behind the Hype
 

If there’s anything that catches eyes on social media, it’s crunchy numbers, revealing statistics, and informative data.

 

 


 

 

It’s the “Gracious me, I didn’t know that” aspect that actually gets the snobbiest of audiences to stop and read your post. Then read it again, and hopefully share or repost it.

 

Besides, using statistics in your social media posts will give them an air of formality and seriousness—this time, you’re not just joking or posting memes, you mean business.


 

  • Post revealing statistics



 



 

15. Create Audience Engagement 
 

The primary goal of your social media strategy should be to create engagement with your customers. This means that they go beyond liking your tweet or sharing it to actually responding to it.

 

One of the best ways to build a solid social media strategy is to create posts that people actually comment on and build meaningful discussions around.
 

We’ve all seen posts with 150k likes and zero comments. You don’t want to be those guys. In social media marketing, you’re better off with a tenth of their likes and 3,000 comments, direct messages, or engagement.


 

  • Create anticipation for your new products
     

  • Ask an interesting question



 


 



 

  • Create a competition



 

 


 

How to Write Engaging Posts on Twitter
 

Twitter might be the most controversial social media tool out there, but when it comes to advertising, engagement, and conversion, it holds its own. 

 

Here are a few helpful tips and tricks to help you master marketing on Twitter to a typical audience:

 

1. Tweet retweetable content

 

Before you post that tweet on Twitter, ask yourself one question. If I was a random person scrolling my feed, would I retweet it?

 

Retweetable content shouldn't neccessarily have to be comedy, fun topics and cat videos. Using thread and lists,  you can start creating  excellent and sharable professional content.

 

2. More is more (280 characters works best)

 

Unlike Facebook, the most shared content on Twitter is a bit chunky. Hence, while posting on Twitter, ensure to use your character limit to the maximum, and don’t shy away from lists and threads.
 

3. Front-load your tweet

 

In Twitter, it's important to hit the nail on the head the first chance you get. Don’t beat around the bush loading intros with generic information then squeezing the essentials towards the end. 

 

To get the best out of your Twitter posts, always insert the important information at the beginning of your Tweet.
 

4. Avoid hyperlinks

 

It’s a well-known fact that audiences on Twitter dislike hyperlinked text and images with a passion. The studies are only confirming what we knew all along, but even worse.

 

According to the journal of marketing research, tweets with picture hyperlinks receive 78.18% fewer retweets and 66.2% fewer likes than Tweets without any pictures.

 

Dominating Facebook: Your Rule Book to Engaging Posts

 

Your uncle’s favorite website still remains the most used social media network in 2022. The only thing bigger than Facebook’s controversy, is the sheer size of the platform with 3 billion users worldwide.
 

This means that regardless of your opinion on Facebook, this social media platform must have a few paragraphs on your social media strategy.

 

Hopefully, the following tips help:
 

1. Less is more

 

The best-performing advertising posts on Facebook are about 40-80 characters long. Audiences on Facebook appreciate and reward conciseness. On that note, leave the fluff and lengthy essays to your competition.

 

To help you with your titles, here is a list of the top-performing words on Facebook captions according to BuzzSumo:



 



 

2. Videos eat Imagery for breakfast
 

According to reliable stats (from Facebook themselves), videos are the best-performing type of media on the platform.

 

Using videos in place of photos (or both) on Facebook will go a long way in entertaining, informing, and appealing content. And if you can use live videos, that’s even better, they get 6 times more engagement.

 

3. Avoid salesy promotional content

 

The algorithms on Facebook crawl captions searching for overly promotional content. These are posts that include words such as “Buy now” and “download this app”

 

According to Facebook, the promotional language you should avoid at all costs are:
 

  • Posts that solely push people to buy a product or download an app
  • Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
  • Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no context

 

Your Masterclass on Crafting Engaging Instagram Posts

 

Instagram dominates social media in terms of engagement with 81% in place of Facebook's 8%. And that’s not the only statistic, others show that engagement rates on Instagram are 6 times higher than those of Facebook.



 

Thanks hubspot



 

1. Visual candy is everything

 

In one study from the journal of marketing research, it was discovered that high-quality images on Twitter and Instagram result in higher engagement rates.


 

2. Leave your target audience wanting more
 

Audiences on Instagram love reading lengthy captions. However, there is a catch, Instagram has a caption limit of 140 characters. 

 

This means that the first few words on your captions have to be epic and leave your audience scrambling for more.
 

You can do this by leading with a catchy headline in capital letters embedded on your visuals , then proceed with a compelling caption. While you're at it, don't forget to adress your customers with the second person pronoun "you".

 

3. A few emojis go a long way
 

What’s an Instagram post without an emoji? Well, emojis are a great addition to engagement with your customer base on Instagram since you can be more liberal with them on the site than other sites.
 

4. Use relevant hashtags 
 

You’ve probably read through this waiting anxiously for the mention of hashtags. Well, if you want to use popular hashtags in your social media advertising, there’s no better place for them than on Instagram. 
 

According to statistics, an Instagram post with at least one hashtag receives 12.6% more engagement than one without a hashtag.

 

To take the guesswork out of searching for hashtags, Hashtagify is a must-have tool for keeping up with the hottest hashtags.
 

5. Leverage Instagram stories in your marketing

 

Did you know that a quarter of Gen Z and millenials use stories to find products they are shopping for.
 

Well, those are your potential customers, who are only increasing as target audiences become majority millenial and Gen Z. Using stories will go a long way in helping you achieve business goals and build a social media presence.

 

Engaging Pinterest Posts 101
 

Pinterest's visual engine is a hidden gem when it comes to social media marketing and creating an online presence. 

 

Did you know that 80% of the Pinterest audience have discovered a product on the platform.
 

On that note, it’s reasonable to join Pinterest and reap as much of the benefits before the gold rush starts and your dusty competitors discover it.

 

1. Leverage vertical imagery
 

Most of the audiences on Pinterest are mobile viewers. Hence for the best results, it's essential to use vertical imagery that is best suited for people scrolling on mobile phones. According to Vengage, the best-performing Infographics on Pinterest are 5-9 times longer than their width.
 

2. You’ll never go wrong with infographics

 

If you’ve been wandering around searching for a home for your Infographics, Pinterest is what you’ve been searching for. 
 

Infographics are some of the best performing types of media on the platform and adding a few quality ones may be your best bet at building an audience there.
 

3. Link back to your website

 

Unlike Instagram, Pinterest allows you to link back to your website. This is huge. Linking back to your website makes Pinterest one of your best avenues for lead generation, conversion and engagement with your potential customers.

 

We’d Love to Write Your Next Social Media Caption…(Your Best One Yet)
 

I'm sure you can write one social media post. You’ll be done in a jiffy and pretty proud of your achievements.

 

However, can you write several, spread across niches, for days on end?


 

 Yeah, just what I thought.

 

Funny enough, one social media post can’t build a strategy, you’re gonna need thousands, and that’s why Zoey is here.

 

Give us your idea, and we’ll give you more than the words.
 

More Guides to Make Your Writing Superb:

 

 

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash. Thank you Robin!